Day 23

Read an interesting article today. It was an interview with Prof Tim Noakes himself. He answers a lot of questions some people may have. You can find the link here. In regard with this month's Time Magazine cover story, I have found a small bit of what was said inside the article. I don't have a Time subscription, so I can't read the full article. Here is the snippet I found:

…the experiment was a failure. We cut the fat, but by almost every measure, Americans are sicker than ever. The prevalence of Type 2 diabetes increased 166% from 1980 to 2012. Nearly 1 in 10 American adults has the disease, costing the health care system $245 billion a year, and an estimated 86 million people are pre-diabetic. Deaths from heart disease have fallen — a fact that many experts attribute to better emergency care, less smoking and widespread use of cholesterol-controlling drugs like statins — but cardiovascular disease remains the country’s No. 1 killer. Even the increasing rates of exercise haven’t been able to keep us healthy. More than a third of the country is now obese, making the U.S. one of the fattest countries in an increasingly fat world. “Americans were told to cut back on fat to lose weight and prevent heart disease,” says Dr. David Ludwig, the director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children’s Hospital. “There’s an overwhelmingly strong case to be made for the opposite.”

Scary. It's almost strange that it took so long for the world to start catching on that we are eating wrong. An average American child of 8 years old have already consumed more sugar in his life than what a person did in his whole life 100 years ago. That is just not natural.

Skewed data sets and incomplete historical evidence was used to publish the first-ever “Dietary Goals for the United States,” in 1977. This steered Americans away from food products containing saturated fat—meat, cheese, milk—and toward carbohydrates. The intention was to encourage U.S. residents to eat more fruits and vegetables. What was accomplished, instead, was a vast expansion of the market for simple starch-based carbs, and for starch-based sweeteners that took the place of fat in industrial food production. And then most of the western world followed the wonderful example set by the American authorities...